The prevailing opinion is that launching an indie Trading Card Game is a fool’s errand. You’ll spend a small fortune printing your game, but you simply cannot print enough to justify randomized product, you wont get enough rares into the communities, and communities will be too small to actually facilitate trading.
I laid out in why tcg? why we believe in the Trading Card Game model. Here I plan to lay out how our products and distribution cover up the pitfalls that most small card games run into.
Before I get too far, I need to shine a light on our dirty little secret. Manifold TCG uses a lot of AI imagery (we don’t like to call it ‘art’). Please read that article if you’re up in arms about it, and then if you’re still up arms… yeah… I get it. Still, I cannot undersell how the opportunity for a firm like us to create this game on the budget that we did is new and unheard of. Also, we’re working with artists as we speak to create Ro’ca’gai for set 3, and have forged new relationships even since the writing of that article.
No randomized product
Our most obvious innovation: our expansion packs are not randomized. Expansion packs contain 21-24 points worth of heroes, and 23 support cards. You can open two packs, shuffle them together, and have a new deck. Techincally that deck might have 48 heroic points, and it will have 46 support cards, which both exceed the 45 / 45 threshold that defines our flagship format, so you need to do a little work to ensure legality, but mostly that deck is ready to go. In order to make that work, and consistently fun, these packs are curated. There are 48 total pack lists, 12 in each color. At some point those lists will be published on the resources page, but that wasn’t true yet at the time of this writing.
A ‘case’ of Manifold includes 8 boxes each of 12 expansion decks. That means 2 of each of the 48 packs appears in a case, which ends up including 2 of each hero, 4 of each rare, 12 of each uncommon, and 24 of each common, except for Launch Box exclusives. I can’t quite guarantee that, the good folks packing the cases are moving a lot of boxes, so some exceptions are likely to occur, but that will be the typical collation. So if you purchase product in large enough quantity, the seeming randomness will disappear.
Not enough Rares in the community.
I touch on this in a perfect balance, but our rares are not that rare, and you don’t need too many of them to build decks. Not only are our commons and uncommons constructed viable, there are only 48 rares in expansion packs of Tyryn Sentinels. Also there are zero variant treatments in expansion packs. No foils, no borderless, nothing. The rares are the chase cards. This combines to mean it takes a relatively small number of packs to get the cards needed for everyone in the community to build their decks.
Communities are too small to facilitate trading.
I’m going to level with you, I expected to already have this game on TCGPlayer, and we have not yet accomplished that goal. That marketplace is the best tool in the United States for retailers to organize their singles to facilitate trade-ins. Hopefully it doesn’t take us too long before our cards are available there.
The good part! Manifold TCG is rolling out to a small number of locations, and we’re dedicated to properly supporting those locations before taking on more customers. Since we expect to have hot spots in Seattle, Salt Lake City, Portland, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Fort Meyers (and hopefully a couple more by the time we launch), if you’re in a hot spot, your community should be big enough to trade. If you’re not in a hot spot, you probably haven’t heard about the game. If you’re not in a hot spot, and you want to be, get your favorite store to e-mail me at service@mountbakergames.com and we’ll see about getting them in our system before we cap out.
In conclusion
Even though we’re a small project, if all of us take this seriously, then we’ll all win. If you’re an interested player, right now your best course is to join the Discord. If you’re an interested retailer, Contact Us with your retail request!
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